PIPELINES TO PATHWAYS: REFRAMING AND RECLAIMING BLACK YOUTH IDENTITIES THROUGH PERFORMANCE Sonny Eugene Kelly A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication in the College of Arts & Sciences. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Renée Alexander Craft Alexandra Lightfoot Patricia Parker Della Pollock Katie Striley © 2020 Sonny Eugene Kelly ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Sonny Eugene Kelly: Pipelines to Pathways: Reframing and Reclaiming Black Youth Identities through Performance (Under the direction of Renée Alexander Craft) This dissertation is a critical performance-centered approach to resisting the dominant narratives that dehumanize and criminalize Black youth and perpetuate the School to Prison Pipeline in America. This approach engages the persons, perspectives, and positionalities of Black youth and their community members en route to articulating, analyzing, and addressing their experience with systemic criminalization and dehumanization. To this end, the Pipelines to Pathways project executes and examines a performance-centered process of antiracist analysis, artistry, and action for, and with, Black youth and their community members. The examination of this process is framed by critical race theory, critical interpersonal communication theory, the communication theory of identity, Goffman’s dramaturgical model of communication, and theories of critical performance and pedagogy. This examinations is based upon two case studies: (1) a performance-centered youth participatory action research project with a group of Black youth in Fayetteville, North Carolina and (2) a performed autoethnography project based upon my own experience as a Black caregiver. This project qualitatively examines the performance process at work and exhibits its power to create spaces and generate intentional practices for Black youth and their community members to explore, examine, and engage in antiracist attitudes and actions that reframe and reclaim the inherent positivity, dignity, and agency of Black youth identities. iii This work is dedicated to the more than four million Black youth living in America today. May you come to thoroughly examine, explore, enact, and enjoy your beauty, dignity, and agency. May you speak, write, act, dance, sing, shout, play, and create in excellent ways that make the world stop and take notice. May you invest every gift and dedicate every performance to the project of LOVE. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might (Ecclesiastes 9:10). iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks be to God for the inspiration and breath to do this work, and for the love from which this work was born, and for which this work is borne. I thank my lovely, loving, long- suffering, laboring wife Elenah Godbolt Kelly for not allowing me to give up the dream, and for holding down our household with tremendous grace amidst all of my extended absences. I couldn’t imagine a better partner to travel on this road with! I thank my brown babies Sterling Berron Kelly and Langston Joel Kelly for making me laugh, cry, play, and hope. I extend a very special thanks to my parents, Berry Crosby and Jo Danielle Kelly, and their parents, Grace Lillian "Ma" Kelly, Berry "Snook" Kelly, George Lawrence “Buster” Shipp and Jean Vernice Shipp. I thank my parents-in-love, the Reverend Doctor Ronnie Godbolt and Co-Pastor Faye Godbolt for their love and spiritual leadership. I thank the ancestors and elders who came before me, whose relentless hope and hustle continue to fuel our most audacious endeavors. Thanks to my advisor Renée Alexander Craft, PhD, for believing in me, investing in me, and challenging me to answer the question, “What is your work doing in the world?” You lead by excellent example, ma’am! I am deeply grateful for each one of the collaborators and crew members on this project! Thank you for your sacrifice of time, talent, treasure, and sleep! Thank you, Joseph Megel, for seeing me, my children, and my people, with love. Thank you, Shauna Hopkins and Johnny Wilson for being my lifelong siblings and advisors, and for allowing me to hold the precious space within which the young giants of Find-A-Friend have outshined the stars v of Hollywood and Broadway with their courage, creativity, compassion, and charisma. Thanks to Eric Chaconas for designing the demographic data display that you see in Appendix F. I am also tremendously grateful to the scholars who have invested in me. Thanks to Dr. Alan Cirlin who was my first favorite professor, mentor, and confidant during my Master’s studies at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, TX. Thanks to Dr. Argentina “Archie” Wortham, who gave me my first job teaching communication at Northeast Lakeview College, San Antonio, TX and has continually encouaraged and challenged me through the PhD process. I thank the members of my dissertation committee: Alexandra Lightfoot, Patricia Parker, Della Pollock, and Katie Striley. Thank you for so generously investing in me your time and talent. Your stellar examples have inspired me to excellence. Each of you has challenged me to do better, pushed me to work smarter, encouraged me dream bigger, and equipped me to transform my world. I thank The Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County for the Regional Artist Grant that funded my travel to visit and observe the Shakespeare Behind Bars program in Louisville, Kentucky in 2016. Thanks to Curt Tofteland and the Shakespeare Behind Bars team for their hospitality and for their indomitable determination to reach those locked up and often forgotten storytellers. The 2016 Graduate Certificate for Participatory Research (GCPR) Seed Grant funded my first summer in the field with the My Life Matters Project in 2016. The 2018 GCPR Seed Grant helped me to finalize My Life Matters and begin working with The Talk in Fayetteville, NC during the summer of 2018. The Carolina Center for Public Service Community Engagement Fellowship and UNC’s Institute of African American Research Graduate Student Summer Research Grant funded my research in Fayetteville, NC during the summer of 2017. The 2017-2018 Maynard Adams Fellowship for Public Humanities (hosted by Carolina Public Humanities) funded the 2018 launch of The Talk in the Chapel Hill, NC area. The 2018-2019 vi Lampley Graduate Fellowship, facilitated by the UNC Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences, also funded this effort. The Humanities Professional Pathway Award from the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities for the Public Good Initiative and the UNC Grad School Suzanne Levy Summer Research Fellowship, helped me to launch Talking The Talk during the summer of 2018. Thanks to Kathy Wood for her the tireless advocacy and encouragement and the 2019 UNC Institute for Minority Excellence Chancellor’s Doctoral Candidacy Award. vii PREFACE Because there’s something inside so strong! I know that I can make it… (Freedom Schools theme song “Something Inside So Strong” by Labi Siffre) In 2011, as a youth pastor at a large predominately Black1church in San Antonio, Texas, I served as the supervisor of a Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools program. Based upon the Freedom Schools that rose up in Mississippi churches during the “Summer of Freedom” in 1964 under the leadership of civil rights leader and scholar Ella Baker, modern day Freedom Schools have sought to educate and empower marginalized children of color through academic and culturally enriching activities since 1995 (CDF, 2014; Hale, 2011). This six-week summer camp includes literacy training, mentoring, field trips, character development opportunities, and multiple extracurricular activities. But, for me, the embodied performance evident in the Freedom Schools program is the magic, the electric force, and the connective tissue that energizes the program to profoundly impact and empower youth. Each day, all of the scholars (students), servant leaders (young adult intern teachers) and adult staff at every Freedom Schools site across the nation start their programming with a gathering called harambee2. This session includes group songs, chants, and dances in the African 1 I capitalize the “B” in “Black” and the “W” in “White” whenever I am referring to people groups. These proper nouns do not assume that the people groups that they name exist as homogeneous monoliths. They do, however, implicate the uniquely divergent social, cultural, and psychological experiences of distinct groups in America. As such, I treat Blackness as a cultural group identity that is “an amalgamation of cultural traditions and social realities that are fused by racial isolation and class distinctions” (Hecht, M., Jackson, R., Ribeau, S., 2002, p. 24). 2 Harambee is Swahili and used in many eastern African countries to mean “all pull/come together.” Freedom Schools employ elements of language, music and style based upon many African and African American traditions in order to celebrate the cultures and languages that are the roots of the identities of many of the underrepresented youth served by Freedom Schools. viii traditions of call and response, collective action, and spiritual connection. There is also a storytelling time where an honored community guest reads a children’s story for the larger group. “Cheers and chants” are shared boisterously, as students “strut their stuff” (sharing their own individual movement styles) and participate in synchronous dances, songs, and chants